Martyna Pawlak

Martyna Pawlak

France/Poland, born in 1988

A multimedia series on digital identity, Following presents a gallery of portraits created from Twitter accounts. In order to question our daily digital experience, Martyna Pawlak turns the spotlight on the American social network, whose popularity has grown in leaps and bounds since its creation in 2006 and which today reaches into millions of homes. By visiting each of them personally, the Franco-Polish artist’s portraits show the participants in the project in their everyday setting. On an Internet platform she has created herself — www.followingme.fr — she then confronts Twitter users with their avatar, thus teasing out the coincidences and discrepancies between an individual’s true identity and that of their digital double. Each photograph in the installation is accompanied by a synthetic voice that reads out tweets posted on the update thread of each avatar. At once weird and funny, some of the, often pointless, comments in the resulting sequence are extremely sarcastic. The series thus reveals the overlap between what is private (a home setting shown in photographic portraits) and the kind of digital anonymity behind which it is always possible to hide. Dubbed an “artistic-digital initiative” by one of the protagonists, this burningly topical project speaks volumes as to our multivalent interactions and identities in what is an ultra-connected society.